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Review by mperkel 
UPDATED: 3.3 years ago
member for 8.9 years, 44 visits, last login: 92 days ago
 San Bruno,San Mateo,CA
 $100 per month
 about 5 days
 "None at this point"
 "Extremely Slow and Unreliable"
 "It used to be great but they merged and now it sucks"
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My original review:
Best connection ever and I've had plenty. I'm buying the 500k upload speed. The download speed is unmetered so you get whatever is available and that's usually about a 6 mb rate. I downloaded the set of three Redhat Fedora CDs in 30 minutes. I got a static IP which is important to me because I'm running a secondary name server from home. I'm REALLY impressed. And - they installed it very quick and it just works.
If you are lucky enough to live in the coverage area - you definitely want this service. Only drawback to me is I'd like to have port 139 unblocked. But to most people this is protection from hackers. But - I set up a tunnel around it for my needs.
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UPDATE: As you can see above I used to really like this service. But that changed about a month ago (today 02-21-05 ) and they merged with someone and it REALLY SUCKS now. I have high ping times to the first router 400 ms and 20 percent packet loss. I cal tech support and I'm getting bullshit responses. I'm really close to changing services here. And it's really too bad because as you can see - I used to love this service.
UPDATE: 03-02-05 - Still sucks - getting worse. I can't even make a phone call using VoIP without getting cut off. Was down fr an hour tonight. High and erratick ping times and random packet loss. Was on hold waiting for customer service for over 30 minutes and hung up.
I will come back and update this if they fix the problem before I dump them.
UPDATE: 03-08-05 - Still sucks - but the slow ping times and packet loss are gone. Now it's just plain slow. They has me go to their speed test page at:
»speedtest.snbr.cablerocket.net/
And I tried it 4 times and getting 600-700k download and 350k upload. And I have bought the 500k upload package. Support tech claims that I'm capped at 1.5mb and says you never really get the max and that 600k is acceptable. The woman was totally clueless and was just paroting what management programmed her to parrot. Management is supposed to call me back.
Talked to management on the phone. They say they have everyone capped back because their cable head device is under capacity and that when it hits 100% it crashes and everyone goes down. (Which is consistent with last weeks service). They say that in two weeks the new one will be installed and that they are going to remove all the caps. I'll be back in 2 weeks to tell you if it happened.
UPDATE: 04-25-2006 After many months they upgraded the equipment. Everything seems to be fine as of October 2005.
UPDATE: 08-14-2006 - Problems are back. About every other day I find that my connection is not working and I have to power cycle the modem to reestablish my connection. This takes my VoIP phone system offline and disrupts my automatic backup of my web servers. The service has never been right since parasun took over.
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Review by zxcvb5312
UPDATED: 3.5 years ago
member for 5.6 years, 2 visits, last login: 3.5 years ago
San Bruno,San Mateo,CA
$30 per month
"Good downstream, techs try their best, network stability is good (for now)"
"Abysmally low default bandwidth limits, relatively low upstream"
"Used to be very good, but slowly and steadily went downhill."
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UPDATE (5/12/06): If you have SanBrunoCable as your ISP and you don't know what your transfer limit is, CALL THE TECH SUPPORT IMMEDIATELY AND ASK. I cannot stress this enough.
Calling the main office was fruitless as even after looking up my account on their computers they did not know what "service plan" my house was signed up for and referred me to tech support. If you have never even heard of the service plans (like me; I've been a customer for many years and this was the first time I ever heard of their limits or service plans) you're probably on the default 'residential' plan that has a transfer limit of 5 GB. Yes, 5 GB. I can go through that in a week and that is stretching things out. Doubtlessly there are people who can go through that in a half day without effort. I knew without a doubt I was way past 5 GB of bandwidth used so I asked how much I was at so far. "27 GB," was the answer. The tech commented, "That's a lot." Indeed it is. A customer for many years and this is all I get unless I upgrade to another plan. According to the AUP, the maximum allowed transfer is 60 GB, and this is if you have the "Professional" plan. Not to mention I had to call and ask what plan I was on and what transfer limit I had. In fact, I did not know about the transfer limit before another poster on this website mentioned it, and then got the specifics over the phone with the cable company and tech support itself.
»www.sanbruno.sanbrunocable.com/p···tableUse
Go to "8.0 Bandwidth/Network Traffic and Other Limitations." Particularly worrying is the part that says "Users exceeding the Bandwidth/Network Traffic amounts specified for their Service Package may be charged $10.00 for each Gigabyte used in excess of their specified amount." Looks like I will be seeing a very, very large bill at the end of this month.
I do not know when the "traffic limiter" kicks in, or even if the following anecdote was a product of it (but according to a description by another poster I believe it was), but if it does, you'll know it unless all you do is surf websites. It does nothing to standard website browsing but to anything else (online games, voice chat programs like ventrilo, etc) you will feel it. 10,000 ping to a Ventrilo server that normally pings 150-200 (and no, it was not the server as only my connection had the problem). Massive lag in practically any online game (likewise, only my connection had the problem). I called tech support (I did not know about the limiter at this time) and the tech I talked to went through hoops for the next half-hour in an attect to rectify the situation. No good. I appreciate his efforts. All of the above paragraph happened about a month ago.
Another gripe is the default upstream, which is about 300kbps. A number of other ISPs have a lower-end upstream limit of their cheap plans of at least 384kbps going to a ceiling of 512kbps, and some have more than that. For San Bruno Cable, 300kbps *is* the ceiling. For those of you who do not use their upstream that often you probably don't care about this but for those of us who do, you will care.
I will call the main office sometime on Monday and hope that I can somehow reduce the fees. I'm not expecting anything good. Thankfully, DSL has recently become available in my area (finally!) and if nothing changes for the better in regards to San Bruno Cable, I am definitely jumping ship. I've stuck with San Bruno Cable through quite a lot where others would have undoubtably switched elsewhere but the addition of these bandwidth limits is my limit. I advise anyone who reads this to check on the availability of other cable/dsl/etc ISPs as well.
Now for part about the good of this ISP: the tech support cares, or if they do not, they are effective in giving the air that they do care. I mentioned earlier the tech who attempted to help me with my problems. In fact, he opened a support ticket that was later followed up by another member of the tech support group without me asking (the problem had mystically solved itself prior to the call though).
Another upside to San Bruno Cable is the downstream. I am easily able to acquire speed tests of 4.5-5.0+ mb. Unfortunately, the new bandwidth transfer limits severely affect this fact's place as a plus. In fact, it very well could be a minus since the faster you download, the faster you'll hit your transfer limit. I feel bad for the person(s) who consistantly speed test in excess of 8000down/1000up as he/she/they have most likely hit their transfer limits for the month long ago.
One more plus to San Bruno Cable is the stability of the network, at least nowadays. I will admit that it has not gone down randomly for quite a while. If you've been with the ISP a year and some ago, you knew how it was. You can probably still see some comments about it somewhere on this site. If you weren't with the ISP then, it can be summed up in a word: Horrible. But I will say again, the network is stable, and has been stable, for quite a while.
VERY, VERY OLD REVIEW (08/14/04): I have had it since the beginning, the first service company they got suck, then home was great now with sprint is great, very fast easy to configure, no dumb homepage to be used, pick your own. uses DOCSIS modem mine is first one like 6-7 years ago still runs great
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Review by Just me
Posted: 4.2 years ago
member for 4.2 years, 55 visits, last login: 258 days ago
San Bruno,San Mateo,CA
Contract price not specified.
"very high pings and way to many hops"
"Bad service and pat answers"
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When it comes to Internet Cable Service San Bruno Cable is just another cable company that wants your money and delivers very poor service, With a pocket loss of 20% and a ping over 100 it is not a company that you would use for online games and if you wanted to just surf the web you would be better off using SBC DSL for $ 14.95 per month. It seens that San Bruno Cable's provider is Sprint and they will bounce you around from one network to another up to 20 times. when you call San Bruno Cable they just tell you how good they are doing and when you talk to the system engineer and start to ask him questions he seems to be stuck on answers because he cant do anything, he can only ask Sprint and it willl take months for them to get back to him or you. When you ask about high pings you get the same old stuff "well sometimes alot of people get on at the same time and your ping will go up " geez only 2,500 people in San Bruno have internet service with all the upgrades they did you would think they can do alot better or atleast come up with a better answer. They say they have "Lightning Speed" internet service mabye they should look up the speed of light, DONT ADVERTISE WHAT YOU DONT HAVE. Just another unhappy customer.
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San Bruno Municipal Cable
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